Proposal: Slim base-5 API package

[Henning Thielemann]

On Wed, 17 Jul 2013, Joachim Breitner wrote:

> there won’t be many base re-implementations, and these will be carefully
> crafted. I’d leave it to those people to pay attention to these details,
> without over-engineering a technical solution.
>
> It should be easily to whack up a script that extracts the API of a
> package (e.g. a list of modules and their contents); just run in on both
> implementations and diff them. In fact, I think I saw someone create
> such a tool already; I just don’t remember who or where.
>
> If you want to make it more formal, we can put this file somewhere as a
> „specification“.

Even if the wanted types won't be enforced by 'base' and there would not 
be a tool to check correct types, we could simply have a package 
'base-check' containing the wanted types and assignments to compiler 
dependent implementations. If you can compile that package with your 
compiler then the types of the implementation are fine.